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PreSoLi

With the initiative of Sampsa Holopainen (Helsinki University), Sampsa, Minerva Piha (Nord University) and I started a Nordic network for early to mid career researchers in prehistoric sociolinguistics in January, 2026.

In PreSoLi network, we will investigate the sociolinguistic aspects of the prehistoric language contacts between Indo-European languages, Uralic languages, and Paleo-European languages in Northern Eurasia with active cooperation between linguistics, archaeology (and anthropology, as well, if possible!).

Our goal is to develop an interdisciplinary method for sociolinguistic analysis on language contact phenomena reconstructed for prehistoric times.

There is a long research history in language contacts especially between Indo-European and Uralic languages. However, the sociolinguistic analysis has not been done on the historical data. Surely it is challenging to apply sociolinguistic methods on prehistoric (reconstructed) datasets, because we do not know the exact social situations and (ancient) speakers' networks of the relevant language groups as there is no written data (that's why it's "prehistoric"....).

So, we will combine a typological approach of sociolinguistics (that does not require detailed information of individual speakers' networks) and evidence from other fields, such as archaeology, to supplement missing information.

My research interests in PreSoLi

I am very glad to be one of the founders of the network PreSoLi.

In the network activities, I am particularly interested in the language contacts between Baltic and Uralic branches, e.g., Saamic and Finnic. In addition to evidence from archaeology, I think evidence from archaeogenomics (for migration routes) and anthropological theory on reciprocity and commensality will be interesting to combine, too. As I attempted in my recent paper, I would like to understand the social situation where the borrowing of loanwords took place by trying to answer a question like what sort of social situation is reflected in the semantic fields of loanwords, or in the borrowing patterns.

- post on 2026-5-21 -

The 1st network meeting at the Center for the Human Past, Uppsala, 19th May, 2026.

Our 1st network meeting took place at the Center for the Human Past in Uppsala. We, coordinators of PreSoLi, presented the aims and the planned activities of our network to the people in Sweden who showed their interests in prehistoric sociolinguistics.

Just presenting ourselves and our research interests to each other was such a big fun! We were a group of historical linguists (Jenny, Anders, and me), Sampsa, Adam, and Anthony, our specialists in Indo-European = Uralic language contact both from the Indo-European and the Uralic sides, Minerva in Saami linguistics / archaeology, and Åsa in Saami religion and Indigeneous Methodologies.

Following the meeting, our PI Sampsa Holopainen gave a lecture on "Indo-European contacts and the history of "West Uralic"."

Many thanks to all those who were there on 19th, and who helped us make it happen!

- post on 2026-4-17 -

We received the first networking fund "Nordic Growth Funding" from University of Helsinki in March! With this grant, we are going to organize a meeting in Sweden, a workshop and one more meeting in Helsinki.

As a part of the PreSoLi activity, now we are planning a sequel project on the prehistoric contact phenomena betweeen Saami languages and various language groups, such as Germanic, Baltic, Finnic, and Paleo-European languages in Fennoscandia. We welcomed one more coordinator, Adam Hyllested, from Denmark for this project planning. The project will be called "Prehistoric Saami Sociolinguistics: PreSaSoLi" (a little confusing acronym...).